THE OLD LION AT BAY.
The morning of the 6th of December dawned grey and cold over London
and the hosts that were waiting for its surrender. Scarcely any smoke
rose from the myriad chimneys of the vast city, for the coal was
almost all burnt, and what was left was selling at £12 a ton. Wood
was so scarce that people were tearing up the woodwork of their
houses to keep a little fire going.
So the steel-grey sky remained clear, for towards daybreak the clouds
had been condensed by a cold north-easter into a sharp fall of fine,
icy snow, and as the sun gained power it shone chilly over the
whitened landscape, the innumerable roofs of London, and the miles of
tents lining the hills to the north and south of the Thames valley.
The havoc wrought by the bombardment on the public buildings of the
great city had been terrible. Of the Houses of Parliament only a
shapeless heap of broken stones remained, the Law Courts were in
ruins, what had been the Albert Hall was now a roofless ring of
blackened walls, Nelson's Column lay shattered across Trafalgar
Square, and the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Mansion
House mingled their fragments in the heart of the almost deserted
city.
Only three of the great buildings of London had suffered no damage.
These were the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, and St Paul's,
which had been spared in accordance with special orders issued by the
commanders of the League. The two former were spared for the same
reason that the Germans had spared Strasburg Cathedral in
1870--because their destruction would have been a loss, not to
Britain alone, but to the world.
The great church of the metropolis had been left untouched chiefly
because it had been arranged that, on the fall of London, the Tsar
was to be proclaimed Emperor of Asia under its dome, and at the same
time General le Gallifet was to assume the Dictatorship of France and
abolish the Republic, which for more than ten years had been the
plaything of unprincipled financiers, and the laughing-stock of
Europe. As the sun rose the great golden cross, rising high out of
the wilderness of houses, shone more and more brightly under the
brightening sky, and millions of eyes looked upon it from within the
city and from without with feelings far asunder as triumph and
defeat.
At daybreak the last meal had been eaten by the defenders of the
city. To supply it almost every animal left in London had been
sacrificed, and the last drop of liquor was drunk, even to the last
bottle of wine in the Royal cellars, which the King shared with his
two commanders-in-chief, Lord Roberts and Lord Wolseley, in the
presence of the troops on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. At nine
o'clock the King and Queen attended service in St. Paul's, and when
they left the Cathedral half an hour later the besiegers on the
heights were astounded to hear the bells of all the steeples left
standing in London ring out in a triumphant series of peals which
rippled away eastward and westward from St. Paul's and Westminster
Abbey, caught up and carried on by steeple after steeple, until from
Highgate to Dulwich, and from Hammersmith to Canning Town, the
beleaguered and starving city might have been celebrating some great
triumph or deliverance.
The astonished besiegers could only put the extraordinary
manifestation down to joy on the part of the citizens at the near
approaching end of the siege; but before the bells of London had been
ringing for half an hour this fallacious idea was dispelled from
their minds in a very stern and summary fashion.
Since nightfall there had been no communication with the secret
agents of the League in the various towns of England and Scotland. At
ten o'clock a small company of Cossacks spurred and flogged their
jaded horses up the northern slope of Muswell Hill, on which the Tsar
had fixed his headquarters. Nearly every man was wounded, and the
horses were in the last stages of exhaustion. Their captain was at
once admitted to the presence of the Tsar, and, flinging himself on
the ground before the enraged Autocrat, gasped out the dreadful
tidings that his little company were the sole survivors of the army
of occupation that had been left at Harwich, and which, twelve hours
before, had been thirty thousand strong.
A huge fleet of strange-looking vessels, flying a plain blood-red
flag, had just before four A.M. forced the approaches to the harbour,
sunk every transport and warship with guns that were fired without
flame, or smoke, or report, and whose projectiles shattered
everything that they struck. Immediately afterwards an immense
flotilla of transports had steamed in, and, under the protection of
those terrible guns, had landed a hundred thousand men, all dressed
in the same plain grey uniform, with no facings or ornaments save a
knot of red ribbon at the button-hole, and armed with magazine rifle
and a bayonet and a brace of revolvers. All were English by their
speech, and every man appeared to know exactly what to do with very
few orders from his officers.
This invading force had hunted the Russians out of Harwich like
rabbits out of a warren, while the ships in the harbour had hurled
their shells up into the air so that they fell back to earth on the
retreating army and exploded with frightful effect. The general in
command had at once telegraphed to London for a detachment of
war-balloons and reinforcements, but no response had been received.
After four hours' fighting the Russian army was in full retreat,
while the attacking force was constantly increasing as transport
after transport steamed into the harbour and landed her men. At
Colchester the Russians had been met by another vast army which had
apparently sprung from the earth, dressed and armed exactly as the
invading force was. What its numbers were there was no possibility of
telling.
By this time, too, treachery began to show itself in the Russian
ranks, and whole companies suddenly appeared with the red knot of
ribbon in their tunics, and instantly turned their weapons against
their comrades, shooting them down without warning or mercy. No
quarter had been given to those who did not show the ribbon. Most of
them died fighting, but those who had thrown away their arms were
shot down all the same.
Whoever commanded this strange army had manifestly given orders to
take no prisoners, and it was equally certain that its movements were
directed by the Terrorists, for everywhere the battle-cries had been,
"In the Master's name!" and "Slay, and spare not!"
The whole of the army, save the deserters, had been destroyed, and
the deserters had immediately assumed the grey uniforms of those of
the Terrorist army who had fallen. The Cossack captain and his forty
or fifty followers were the sole remains of a body of three thousand
men who had fought their way through the second army. The whole
country to the north and east seemed alive with the grey soldiery,
and it was only after a hundred hair-breadth escapes that they had
managed to reach the protection of the lines round London.
Such was the tale of the bringer of bad tidings to the Tsar at the
moment when he was looking forward to the crowning triumph of his
reign. Like the good soldier that he was, he wasted no time in
thinking at a moment when everything depended on instant action.
He at once despatched a war-balloon to the French and Italian
headquarters with a note containing the terrible news from Harwich,
and requesting Generals le Gallifet and Cosensz to lose no time in
communicating with the eastern and southern ports, and in throwing
out corps of observation supported by war-balloons. Evidently the
American Government had played the League false at the last moment,
and had allied herself with Britain.
As soon as he had sent off this message, the Tsar ordered a fleet of
forty aerostats to proceed to the north-eastward, in advance of a
force of infantry and cavalry numbering three hundred thousand men,
and supported by fifty batteries of field and machine guns, which he
detached to stop the progress of the Federation army towards London.
Before this force was in motion a reply came back from General le
Gallifet to the effect that all communication with the south and east
was stopped, and that an aerostat, which had been on scout duty
during the night, had returned with the news that the whole country
appeared to be up in arms from Portsmouth to Dover. Corps of
observation and a fleet of thirty aerostats had been sent out, and
three army corps were already on the march to the south and east.
Meanwhile, the hour for the surrender of London was drawing very
near, and all the while the bells were sending their mingled melody
of peals and carillons up into the clear frosty air with a defiant
joyousness that seemed to speak of anything but surrender. As twelve
o'clock approached the guns of all the batteries on the heights were
loaded and trained on different parts of the city, and the whole of
the forces left after the detachment of the armies that had been sent
to engage the battalions of the Federation prepared to descend upon
the devoted city from all sides after the two hours' incessant
bombardment that had been ordered to precede the general attack.
It had been arranged that if the city surrendered a white flag was to
be hoisted on the cross of St. Paul's.
Within a few minutes of twelve the Tsar ascended to the roof of the
Alexandra Palace on Muswell Hill, and turned his field-glasses on the
towering dome. His face and lips were bloodless with repressed but
intense anxiety, but the hands that held his glasses to his eyes were
as steady as though he had been watching a review of his own troops.
It was the supreme moment of his victorious career. He was
practically master of Europe. Only Britain held out. The relieving
forces would be rent to fragments by his war-balloons, and then
decimated by his troops as the legions of Germany and Austria had
been. The capital of the English-speaking world lay starving at his
feet, and a few minutes would see--
Ha! there goes the flag at last. A little ball of white bunting
creeps up from the gallery above the dark dome. It clears the railing
under the pedestal, and climbs to the apex of the shining cross. As
it does so the wild chorus of the bells suddenly ceases, and out of
the silence that follows come the deep booming strokes of the great
bell of St. Paul's sounding the hour of twelve.
As the last stroke dies away the ball bursts, and the White Ensign of
Britain crossed by the Red Cross of St. George, and with the Jack in
the corner, floats out defiantly on the breeze, greeted by the
reawakening clamour of the bells, and a deep hoarse cry from millions
of throats, that rolls like a vast sea of sound up the slopes to the
encampments of the League.
With an irrepressible cry of rage, Alexander dashed his field-glass
to the ground, and shouted, in a voice broken with passion--
"So! They have tricked us. Let the bombardment begin at once, and
bring that flag down with the first shots!"
But before the words were out of his mouth, the bombardment had
already commenced in a very different fashion to that in which he had
intended that it should begin. So intense had been the interest with
which all eyes had been turned on the Cross of St. Paul's that no one
had noticed twelve little points of shining light hanging high in air
over the batteries of the besiegers, six to the north and six to the
south.
But the moment that the Ensign of St. George floated from the summit
of St. Paul's a rapid series of explosions roared out like a
succession of thunder-claps along the lines of the batteries. The
hills of Surrey, and Kent, and Middlesex were suddenly transformed
into volcanoes spouting flame and thick black smoke, and flinging
clouds of dust and fragments of darker objects high into the air.
The order of the Tsar was obeyed in part only, for by the time that
the word to recommence the bombardment had been flashed round the
circuit of the entrenchments, more than half the batteries had been
put out of action. The twelve air-ships stationed at equal intervals
round the vast ellipse, and discharging their No. 3 shell from their
four guns ahead and astern, from an elevation of four thousand feet,
had simultaneously wrecked half the batteries of the besiegers before
their occupants had any clear idea of what was really happening.
Wherever one of those shells fell and exploded, earth and stone and
iron melted into dust under the terrific force of the exploding
gases, and the air-ships, moving with a velocity compared with which
the utmost speed of the aerostats was as a snail's pace, flitted
hither and thither wherever a battery got into action, and destroyed
it before the second round had been fired.
There were still twenty-five aerostats at the command of the Tsar
which had not been sent against the relieving forces, and as soon as
it was realised that the aërial bombardment of the batteries came
from the air-ships of the Terrorist fleet, they were sent into the
air to engage them at all hazards. They outnumbered them two to one,
but there was no comparison between the manoeuvring powers of the two
aërial squadrons.
As soon as the aerostats rose into the air, the Terrorist fleet
receded northward and southward from the batteries. Their guns had a
six-mile range, and it did not matter to them which side of the
assailed area they lay. They could still hurl their explosives with
the same deadly precision on the appointed mark. But with the
aerostats it was a very different matter. They could only drop their
shells vertically, and where they were not exactly above the object
of attack their shells exploded with comparative harmlessness.
As a natural consequence they had to follow the air-ships, not only
away from London, but over their own encampments, in order to bring
them to anything like close quarters. The aerostats possessed one
advantage, and one only, over the air-ships. They were able to rise
to a much greater height. But this advantage the air-ships very soon
turned into a disadvantage by reason of their immensely superior
speed and ease of handling. They darted about at such a speed over
the heads of the massed forces of the League on either side of
London, that it was impossible to drop shells upon them without
running the inevitable risk of missing the small and swiftly-moving
air-ship, and so causing the shell to burst amidst friends instead of
foes.
Thus the Terrorist fleet, sweeping hither and thither, in wide and
ever changing curves, lured the most dangerous assailants of the
beleaguered city farther and farther away from the real scene of
action, at the very time when they were most urgently needed to
support the attacking forces which at that moment were being poured
into London.
To destroy the air-ships seemed an impossibility, since they could
move at five times the speed of the swiftest aerostat, and yet to
return to the bombardment of the city was to leave them free to
commit what havoc they pleased upon the encampments of the armies of
the League. So they were drawn farther and farther away from the
beleaguered city, while their agile enemies, still keeping within
their six-mile range, evaded their shells, and yet kept up a constant
discharge of their own projectiles upon the salient points of the
attack on London.
By four o'clock in the afternoon all the batteries of the besiegers
had been put out of action by the aërial bombardment. It was now a
matter of man to man and steel to steel, and so the gage of final
battle was accepted, and as dusk began to fall over the beleaguered
city, the Russian, French and Italian hosts left their lines, and
descended from their vantage ground to the assault on London, where
the old Lion at bay was waiting for them with claws bared and teeth
grinning defiance.